The comprehension of solid/solid, fluid/solid and fluid/bubble interactions in moderately to highly concentrated particulate and bubbly flows is of great interest from both fundamental and practical points of view. The hydrodynamics of such complex flows is still partially understood, even if the fluid phase exhibits simple Newtonian properties and, in the particular case of particulate flows, the particles are monodisperse spheres (3D) or circular cylinders (2D). The primary reason for such a limited understanding is the fact that such processes involve phenomena at very different scales from the particle to the flow domain. The momentum transfer from the smallest scales like the interaction between two nearby particles to the largest ones evidenced by the formation of clusters of particles or the coalescence of bubbles/drops leads to tremendous alterations of flow dynamics. In such flows, the consideration of coupling between fluid flow and particles/bubbles/drops motion can not be ignored, otherwise significantly flawed modeling of the phenomenon would be developed. The range of industrial and scientific applications of particulate/bubbly flows is quite broad: rock cuttings in drilling operation in mining and petroleum engineering, river sediment in environmental sciences, fluidized beds and bubbly columns in chemical engineering, blood cells in biological engineering, water/oil emulsions in oil production, etc.

Li et al., Chemical Engineering Science 59 (2004)

The aim of the PeliGRIFF project is to develop efficient parallel numerical tools to investigate the momentum and heat transfer between the dispersed phase and the suspending fluid. Various tools at the micro, meso and macro scale have been implemented and are integrated in a multi-scale analysis. The PeliGRIFF code focuses on the micro and meso scales. We expect that progress achieved at the micro scale will eventually cascade upwards and contribute to enhance the model at the meso and macro scale, and thus extend our global comprehension of the dynamics of dispersed phase flows.

PeliGRIFF and Grains3D are IFP Energies nouvelles property numerical codes. They are designed, developed, maintained and validated by the Fluid Mechanics Department of IFPEN. The developement of PeliGRIFF started in 2007, while we actually started to work on the numerical simulation of dispersed phase flows in 2005. The on-going work on Grains3D and PeliGRIFF has led to the creation of a research group in the Fluid Mechanics Department, named the PeliGRIFF Group, supervised by Dr. Abdelkader Hammouti.